Speaking their language: Delivering tech-enabled learning for digital natives

Digital natives are emerging as the globe’s dominant demographic. The term was coined in 2001 by Marc Prensky and refers to people who have been brought up in the digital era using computers, tablets, smartphones and social media from an early age. This group is very different from what Prensky calls ‘digital immigrants’; those of us who have lived in the analogue age and immigrated to the digital world.¹

It’s no surprise really that these groups of people have different preferences for how they want to learn. Most learning and development practitioners are fairly comfortable with delivering effective learning for digital immigrants, that’s been the audience for the past 30 years or so. But with the growing population of digital natives in the workforce, how confident are you that your learning and development programmes are delivering against their wants and needs? 

In education, Prensky suggests that failure to understand the needs of these modern learners is the fundamental cause of the decline in education in the US, “Today’s students are no longer the people our educational system was designed to teach.” 1

Could that apply to your learning and development programmes too? Are your learners no longer the people your L&D programmes were designed for? It’s certainly something worth considering.